Q&A: A Thomistic Response to Ethnonationalism

Q. I detest identity politics because I believe that political elites are over-emphasizing race and deliberately inflaming racial tensions as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy, but I also cannot help but notice that many conservatives seem to entirely discount the importance of race. If bodily characteristics do matter, as we Catholics believe human beings are the union of body and soul, then can the rise of ethnonationalism be interpreted as a legitimate reaction to modern dualism?

A. The questioner’s comment on body-soul dualism is very important, as many religious people today are body-soul dualists, whether they realize it or not, as they tend to overreact to modern materialism. This may seem initially unrelated to the racial question, but in reality, confusion about the nature of race and its importance in human society stems from a lack of philosophical clarity on this matter. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the Thomistic distinctions as regards matter and form and how they relate to the Catholic understanding of the human person. Because matter is the principle of individuation, the body (matter) individuates the soul (form), and so each soul animates a particular body and not any other. While the soul is neither male nor female, neither black nor white, God proportioned each soul to each body so that one person’s soul cannot be transplanted into another person’s body.

The Church teaches that each human soul is immediately created by God, and so we must reject the notion that the soul is passed from parents to children; however, this concept that matter individuates form accounts for the observable inheritance of certain psychological traits between generations. The body impacts the soul: for example, when it comes to sexual difference, there are psychological and spiritual traits particular to men and women that arise from the functions they serve in the generation of offspring. While the soul itself does not possess sex, it is impacted by the bodily sex of the possessor. However, I would be more hesitant to apply such a concept to race, beginning with the fact that while race is an observable characteristic and most assuredly not a social construct as many modern intellectuals would have it, the manner in which is has been classified has always been dependent upon cultural, political, and social factors. Further, while sexual difference is absolute, since everyone must be either male or female and cannot be both or neither, race is not, as the existence of mixed-race people illustrates.

Sexual difference was created immediately and directly by God for the generation of offspring, thus making it a necessary accident, but racial differences were not; on the contrary, all human beings descend from the same two parents, Adam and Eve. Male and female bodies function differently insofar as the generation of offspring is concerned, but otherwise, all human bodies function the same way, regardless of what race a person belongs to. While God did directly scatter people across the world and assign different languages to them, the history of racial development is much more complex and has always been related to questions of culture, politics, and even religion. There is no single characteristic that defines race; in an American context, race is often associated with the color of a person’s skin, but even that characterization is not absolute. Certainly, no reasonable person would say that a dark-skinned man of Indian descent belongs to the same race as a man of African descent, even if both share almost identical shades of skin.

Instead of defining race as a single accident of the human person, perhaps it would be more accurate to view it as a collection of various accidents; certainly, the existence of mixed-race people, who share characteristics from two or more races, would indicate this. How others perceive a person’s race depends on observing this collection of different physical characteristics and how they form a composite whole. Being much more complex and less easily-identifiable than a person’s sex, biological race in itself contributes less to a person’s sense of self-identity than his or her sex, and when race or ethnicity are divorced from the sharing of a common cultural and linguistic heritage, one may even argue that the physical characteristics themselves are of little consequence. This would explain why, for example, Our Lord did not restrict priestly ordination to men of Jewish descent, although the first clerics of the Church were Jewish; He did restrict it to men, however, as only males, regardless of their race or ethnicity, can be spiritual fathers.

However, drawing a parallel between race and sex is not entirely without merit: the sexual differentiation of the body has an impact on the soul, and so racial differences, which likewise reside in the body, could very well give rise to temperamental differences between different groups of people. If a large group of people share similar temperaments, then one would expect this to have societal effects, given that human beings are social by nature. The question of ethnonationalism, then, concerns whether there is in fact a necessary relationship between race and culture, thus leading to the proposal that different races should ideally live in different nations. Proponents of this ideology are not completely off the mark when they argue that more attention must be paid to the body, but the conclusion that race is a constituent part of an individual’s or a group’s identity based solely on biological differences, which give rise to culture as a merely secondary institution, is a reductionist way of thinking contrary to both historical evidence and sound philosophy.

From a political standpoint, the concept of the nation-state as the default method of organizing human societies is of relatively recent origin, dating back to the Westphalian implementation of cujus regio, ejus religio, therefore making it an inherently liberal and non-Catholic concept to begin with. While it is true that terms such as “nation,” “race,” or “people” in ancient texts were used interchangeably, it would be anachronistic to interpret those texts in light of the modern conflation of “nation” (a general term to describe a politically organized group of people) with “nation-state” (a particular form of political organization). Prior to the establishment of the modern country of Spain, for example, a person who would be referred to as “Spanish” by modern observers would have identified with being from Aragon or Castille, whatever the case might have been. Thus, while different ethnicities would have been more likely to live separately, even if only on account of the difficulty of travel before modern technology, they could still be united under a central political authority without prejudice to subsidiarity. Much more can be said on this, but let us move onto the philosophical considerations, as this is not a historical study.

The races differ in a variety of physical traits, and this is observably true, but unlike sexual differentiation, these accidents are not necessary to or inseparable from the human person. Being male or female is an inseparable characteristic precisely because no person can simultaneously be both male and female or simply not possess a sex. The various characteristics that define a racial group, however, are not so necessary to a person’s identity; for example, many children born with blue eyes tend to develop brown or green eyes as they grow up, and this has no impact on their identity or their soul. If a man were to change into a woman (if such a thing were possible), then he would need a new soul; however, he would not need a new soul if his eyes or even skin change from one color to another. In addition, these superficial physical traits are not necessarily exclusive to one race or another. One can narrow down the number of possible races a person belongs to if he has blue eyes, for example, but this is not always a reliable indicator.

In fact, by observing the patterns of inheritance, one may reasonably conclude that there is a greater amount of intraracial diversity relative to interracial diversity: the amount of genetic variation seen within one race is greater than the average difference between the races. Further, races that are more phenotypically homogeneous due to the higher rate of expression of dominant traits may very well be more genotypically heterogeneous. The genes that code for brown eyes are dominant over those for blue eyes, but it is very possible for two brown-eyed parents to have a blue-eyed child. If one were to posit that physical differences correlated with race give rise to observably different personality traits, one would have to contend with the question of whether genotype or phenotype should be considered in such an assessment. If two people are phenotypically different but genotypically similar, then two people who belong to different races may very well have more similar temperaments than two who belong to the same race. In other words, is it the genetic potential of a person that matters or only its actual expression?

On this note, it should be pointed out that no individual is pure “nature” or pure “nurture”; in fact, an Aristotelian or Thomistic thinker can reasonably posit that this is a false dichotomy, as we are really considering the extent to which potency is actualized through an individual’s environment, free choice, and cooperation with the grace of God. Even if we were to assume that the races can be clearly defined solely biologically without reference to culture and language, and that distinct temperaments can be clearly ascribed to them, the natural temperament that a person is born with is simply a matter of potency, and the extent to which this natural temperament is cultivated determines how well this potency is actualized. In practical, day-to-day life, people act according to a combination of their natural inclinations and their habituated traits, and so even if one were to accept that there are clear-cut differences in natural temperament between different races, these differences cannot suffice to account for the complex differences in culture that have arisen throughout history.

Cultures are created by a greater variety of factors than race or temperament alone: some changes may result from human actions, while others may be outside of human control entirely. Attitudes may shift artificially as a result of propaganda, something that we have been seeing for the past several decades. Some individuals have a disproportionate impact on the trajectory of historical events than others. If famine, war, or plague kills off a large portion of the population, the loss of these individuals could lead to a cultural shift—for example, the Black Death killed off many good priests who contracted the plague from visiting the sick, which provided fertile ground for an increase in corruption among the clergy as the ratio of good to bad shifted, culminating with the so-called Protestant “Reformation.” The very race that was set apart and made holy by God to prepare the way of the Messiah also ended up rejecting that same Messiah. Following this, the same Gentile peoples who received the Catholic faith and built Christendom were also responsible for falling away from the faith, inventing the most harmful ideologies known to man, and forming the godless modern world.

With all of this in mind, we see that no clear correlation can be drawn between race and temperament, nor between temperament and culture, that could justify requiring the separation of races into separate nations. While body-soul dualism is a serious error, and modern people do place too little importance on the racial question, ethnonationalism and other race-first ideologies cannot be a solution from a Catholic, and specifically a Thomistic, perspective. We do not live in Old Testament times, and under the New Covenant, we ought to be united by professing the one true faith and belonging to the one true Church, whose universality reverses the scattering of peoples that God imposed as punishment in times past. This does not mean that we should deliberately promote mass migration or globalism, but simply that God foresaw that the peoples would mix together again eventually, whether through His perfect or permissive will. Through His Church, He provides sufficient grace to deal with any political or social problems that may result from this, as religion is ultimately more important than race or even culture.